Banyan | Indonesia's democracy

A new kind of president

His opponent may refuse to concede defeat, but he has been most surely defeated

By N.O. | JAKARTA

THE wait is over. After taking two weeks to count 135m ballots from 480,000-odd polling stations across the vast archipelago, Indonesia’s Election Commission (the KPU) has at last confirmed that Joko Widodo has been elected president. The commission said that Mr Joko, the governor of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, and his vice-presidential running mate, Jusuf Kalla, won 71m votes at the election on July 9th. That represents 53.2% of the valid votes. The losers, Prabowo Subianto and Hatta Rajasa, won 62.6m votes, or 46.9%. Mr Joko was victorious in 23 of the country’s 33 provinces. His winning margin of 8.4m votes, or 6.3 percentage points, was even wider than had been predicted by most of the respected pollsters on the night of the election.

Mr Joko, known to all as Jokowi, is due to start his five-year term as leader of the world’s third-largest democracy on October 20th. He will be like no leader Indonesia has had before, with roots in neither the army nor an established family. This sets him apart from his early patron, Megawati Sukarnoputri, who is the daughter of Indonesia’s founding president Sukarno and was president herself from 2001 to 2004. Instead Jokowi rose up through local government, a product of the far-reaching political decentralisation that was introduced after the overthrow of Suharto, Indonesia’s late dictator, in 1999. A former furniture-seller, Jokowi was elected mayor of Solo, a medium-sized city in central Java, before becoming Jakarta’s governor in 2012. He has a reputation for being a man of the people.

Jokowi faces some big challenges. Indonesia’s economy, the largest in South-East Asia, is slowing. Annual growth fell to 5.2% in the first quarter, its slowest rate in more than four years. Wasteful energy subsidies are costing the government some $30 billion a year and contribute to a destabilising current-account deficit. The sprawling bureaucracy needs reform. And the hunt for natural resources is ravaging the archipelago’s remaining forests and spoiling its seas. But Jokowi’s most pressing challenge will be to repair the rifts caused by the election itself, which has been the most divisive in Indonesia’s history.

The president-elect has already made a start. In a midnight victory speech from aboard an old pinisi cargo vessel at Jakarta’s crumbling Sunda Kelapa port, Jokowi struck a conciliatory note by calling for a “united Indonesia” and appealing to voters to put behind them the divisions of the election campaign.

Defiant in defeat

That may take a while yet. Mr Prabowo, a former special-forces general with a poor record on human rights, refuses to concede. Instead, just hours before the election commission completed its final count, Mr Prabowo appeared in defiance on the steps of a pillared mansion in eastern Jakarta to say he was “withdrawing” from the election in protest against “massive cheating”. Soon afterwards his witnesses harrumphed out of the KPU count. By law, Mr Prabowo has three days to challenge the result of the election at the constitutional court. As The Economist went to press, it was still unclear whether Mr Prabowo would exercise that right. Should he decide to do so, the court would have to announce its verdict by August 22nd. There is no right of appeal.

A case would test the institutions of Indonesia's young democracy, especially the Constitutional Court. Set up after the fall of Suharto, its reputation suffered a severe blow earlier this year when Akil Mochtar, its former chief justice, was imprisoned for life after being convicted of graft—for rigging rulings in disputed local elections. His successor, Hamdan Zoelva, used to belong to one of the six parties that backed Mr Prabowo. Their association makes many Jokowi supporters uneasy.

Still, it is hard to see how a challenge could succeed. The court would have to find evidence that more than 4m votes had been tampered with to overturn Jokowi’s victory. Some irregularities in the counting process have come to light, but Mr Prabowo has produced no evidence of fraud on the scale he alleges.

And while the court may have the final say on the election, the political mood already seems to be turning Jokowi’s way. After parliamentary elections in April, Mr Prabowo had assembled a grand coalition that controls 52% of the 560 seats in the incoming House of Representatives. Earlier this month they revised a law to prevent Jokowi’s party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, from automatically taking the post of speaker of parliament. But now Mr Prabowo’s coalition allies seem to be abandoning him.

As Mr Prabowo railed against election cheating, his running mate, Mr Rajasa, who has been at his side throughout the campaign, was conspicuously absent. Aburizal Bakrie, the chairman of Golkar, the second-biggest party in the incoming legislature, was there to stand by Mr Prabowo’s invective. But there is speculation that Golkar members could soon depose Mr Bakrie and transfer their allegiance to Jokowi and Mr Kalla, who used to be the chairman of Golkar. Earlier Mohammad Mahfud MD, a respected former chief justice at the constitutional court, resigned as Mr Prabowo’s campaign chief; he has said he will play no part in any legal challenges.

So far Indonesia’s reputation for peaceful transitions of power remains intact. More than 3,000 riot police were placed on high alert in Jakarta amid rising tensions between the two camps, but there has been no violence between them. The outgoing president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has appealed for calm. In a bid to defuse tensions, he invited both candidates to the presidential palace to break the Ramadan fast together on the evening of July 20th. The following day Mr Yudhoyono said that it was “noble” to admit defeat.

(Picture credit: The Economist / N.O.)

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